Matt Damon spent part of a 40-minute Academy Museum Q&A on Saturday doing an unpaid favor for Robert Pattinson’s awards campaign, telling the crowd that Ben Affleck “probably talked to me for 20 minutes about just Rob after he saw” The Odyssey. It matters because nobody from Universal’s marketing department wrote that line, and because the panel next to Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel and Elliot Page, kept adding testimony the studio didn’t need to buy.
Damon’s version of Affleck’s review got specific fast: “Rob had all of the weight and heft and power of Christopher Nolan’s storytelling coming down on him. And the way he did it, it was like watching a guy run into an avalanche.” He followed with the detail that actually describes a performance choice: “Any moment that he could be more cowardly, more hateable, you could see his wheels turning. ‘How could I make this even worse for myself?’”
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The timing is doing almost as much work as the quote. The Guardian relayed Puck’s Matthew Belloni reporting Friday that Pattinson is now the favorite to replace Daniel Craig as Bond, on a test deal covering three films where rivals were asked for four, at a bigger fee. Variety had Pattinson and Nicholas Hoult screen-testing for Denis Villeneuve back on Nov. 6, with Amazon declining comment then and no casting confirmed since.
By the numbers: The Odyssey has made $1.8 billion worldwide, $626 million of it domestic, against a $250 million budget, good for the second-biggest domestic run in Universal’s history behind Jurassic World’s $653.4 million. Its July opening alone did $264.1 million worldwide, the biggest of Nolan’s career (a man who already had Oppenheimer and both Dark Knight sequels to beat).
The rest of the panel kept the receipts coming without any prompting about Bond. Holland wasn’t scheduled to shoot the Ithaca reunion between Damon and Anne Hathaway, showed up anyway, and told the room that “watching you guys go the distance in that scene just really set the tone for us of the level that we should all aspire to be at for a movie like this.” Zendaya, playing Athena and a Trojan priestess, said the format made her nervous before the material did: “You’re shooting on IMAX film and you can hear the sound of it going,” and she “did not want to be the one that was going to mess up this take.”
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What this probably means. The Bond heat and the Oscar push are feeding each other on purpose or by accident, and either way Pattinson benefits twice this week. Variety’s own tally of Universal’s FYC submissions puts Pattinson in supporting actor next to Holland and Leguizamo, meaning his loudest character witnesses are also his category competition (awards season has never minded that contradiction). Pattinson is 40 and has never been nominated, and Variety flagged in September that his four films across two categories this season risk splitting his own vote. The precedent is not generous either: only Titanic and The Return of the King have won best picture after clearing a billion dollars.
The Odyssey returns to more than 1,000 theaters, IMAX 70mm included, on Dec. 11, with Oscar shortlists landing four days later on Dec. 15.
